In developing a product such as a server and in constructing a structure such as a data center, thermal design takes place in order to determine the proper positions of cooling mechanisms, air-conditioning facilities, and the like. For efficient thermal design, it is important to carry out a thermal hydraulic simulation to grasp the thermal distribution and the flow of air inside an object to be designed beforehand. Namely, before a prototype of an object to be designed is manufactured, a thermal hydraulic simulation is carried out on a computer under analysis condition variously modified by the computer, and on the basis of the results of the simulation under the various conditions, the thermal design can be examined depending on trial and error.
Known simulation schemes are the Software In the Loop Simulation (SILS) that carries out a software simulation to incorporate a handling function into a vehicle and the interactive simulation for a mechanism simulation. In an interactive simulation, when the user makes an operation of an object to be simulated, the result of simulation reflecting the operation is immediately visualized.
However, the above interactive simulation has not been applied to a thermal hydraulic simulation for the following reasons.
Generally, a thermal hydraulic simulation previously sets analysis condition including a boundary condition and other condition and a number of time steps that chronologically continue, and carries out a time series simulation in which the analysis through solving thermal hydraulic equations using the above analysis condition is repeated in the respective time steps. If an analysis condition is modified while such a time series simulation is being carried out, that is, while the analysis of a single time step is being carried out, the analysis using thermal hydraulic equations fails to attain a correct result of simulation.
For the above, in a thermal hydraulic simulation, modification in analysis condition during the analysis needs to previously set time series change in analysis condition, and the result of simulation in which the modification in analysis condition is reflected is obtained through inevitable restarting of the analysis from the first time step. Consequently, it is impossible for the user to immediately reflect a modification in analysis condition, made during the analysis, in the simulation, so that the user does not immediately grasp the influence caused by the modification in analysis condition. Furthermore, to obtain the result of a simulation in which the modification in analysis condition is reflected takes a long processing time.